When you’ve just set up your business, you don’t often have the money to spend on the ‘luxury’ of a lawyer to write your contract for you. However, what you really shouldn’t do is blindly copy terms off friends, clients, suppliers, the internet or from the back of a holiday
I was asked to sign a framework agreement recently [read more] that said it did not create mutual obligations. I refused as that clause showed a fundamental misunderstanding of what a contract does. This was not the first time I had seen this type of clause … Mutual obligations A
If we can tell stories in our business marketing then we can tell stories with our contract terms… The show will (probably) go on Strictly Come Dancing (a BBC TV show) includes a public vote and it’s T&C have improved from their original lengthy version. I think they could tell
In 2013 the University of Salford hosted an event (organised by the Constructing Excellence Manchester Best Practice Club) at which over 100 people heards about the Pitfalls of NEC3. What struck me was that many of the knotty problems associated with NEC3 apply to any form contract. What you should
Your knowledge of the law is irrelevant to your liability. Given that you have to comply (whatever your contract or conscience says), why do most contracts require the parties to comply with statutory requirements? Clarity Although ‘ignorance is no defence’, contracts are tools to help the parties to understand their
The first stage for reviewing a contract is to read it. Best practice, as set out in Which Contract? suggests that you ‘study its contents and understand its implications’. Some of you do not read your contracts: you let them gather dust. If you don’t read your contract, it goes
During the Annual NEC User Group conference, I had a lively twitter debate with Chris Hallam (@ChrisHallamLaw), a Partner at CMS, on the use of NEC3 (the New Engineering Contract, Engineering and Construction Contract, Third edition). From reading between the lines, I don’t think he’s convinced by NEC’s preference for
When is an offer not an offer but the award of a contract? When its a snake in the grass? The TCC recently has to grapple with the rights of the parties under a framework agreement, in unusual circumstances. What is a framework agreement? A framework agreement normally allows an
Can you amend a bonded (or guaranteed) contract without the beneficiary losing its rights to claim under the associated bond? This was the decision of the Court of Appeal in Hackney Empire v Aviva which has received more coverage than most bond cases. Is it because the case decided a
With any bond and all guarantees, it is imperative that the document continues to provide a form of surety throughout the life of a project. That means the document has to continue to bite even where there are changes to the project: whether that is changes to the scope, the